A place where I'll post up some thoughts and ideas - especially on literature in education, children's literature in general, poetry, reading, writing, teaching and thoughts on current affairs.

Thursday, 19 March 2015

Using the deficit argument to smash public services

In the post-Budget fog, there are occasional dissident voices that say something along the lines that obsessing about small differences in 'the deficit' is some kind of smokescreen for what's really going on. In other words, capitalism can cope with what are by all accounts relatively small differences (i.e. people go on lending money to each other).

So, what is really taking place is a deliberate attack on public services, the public sector and wages for ideological reasons not 'sound economic ones' under the cover of saying that 'we are balancing the economy' .

This point is extremely hard to make because a) Labour keep fudging it by going on and on about 'we're going to balance the books better than the Tories' even as they do indeed point out the potential disasters ahead by cutting the public sector. b) interviewers talk over people the moment they try to make this point.

So, we're living in a time when the post-war arrangement of public welfare is being smashed to bits, and the conversation about this is being constrained and restricted.